Twin Cities Pagan Pride feels strongly about supporting our local community and about making sustainable choices wherever possible. We welcome additional suggestions.

Food drive:
A food drive is a required activity of all Pagan Pride events. Our food in 2008 was donated to Sabathani’s own food shelf, serving the immediate community in south Minneapolis, and we plan to do the same in 2009.

Transitions Plus Food Program:
Starting in 2007, we have worked with a Minneapolis Public Schools program to provide food at our event.

Transitions Plus provides an adult environment for students with disabilities, ages 18 – 21, to provide appropriate services, resources, agency linkages, and to provide a smooth transition from high school to the adult world. They offer several different programs, including a food service option.

Twin Cities Pagan Pride is a great chance for these students to plan and provide food service (under teacher supervision) at a community event, allowing them to practice their skills in a friendly environment. Money from the food sales covers food expenses, and then is split between Transitions Plus and Twin Cities Pagan Pride, allowing us to keep prices low while offering a variety of options.

Site choice:
We’re very happy to be back at Sabathani Community Center for our fourth year in 2009. Sabathani hosts a wide range of community organisations, small business offices, and other activities. Our site fees go back into supporting a vibrant and important community resource.

T-shirts:
We spent a long time hunting for a t-shirt screening option that could provide ethically made shirts – and we were delighted to find Skreened.

Please note: the women’s sizes run small (check measurements carefully and order a size larger if you’ve got questions) and we recommend the current multicolor designs on a lighter color shirt (we liked the pale yellow and silver a lot.)

Skreened got a lot more information in their ethics statement but in brief:

• Shirts are made by American Apparel: they are made in the United States by employees paid a fair wage.
• They use a variety of environmentally friendly practices – everything from office recycling to minimal packaging to water-based inks.
• They give 10% of their profits each month to charitable causes.
• They offer organically grown cotton options (though we do wish they had a wider range of sizes for these shirts).

Web hosting:
We host the tcpaganpride.org site at Drak.net, which has an extensive history of hosting non-profit and grassroots websites (at any given time, up to 25% of their clients are hosted for free or at discount rates.) They also buy solar energy equivalent to their energy use, recycle and minimize paper at all stages of the business, and have an ongoing series of grants funded with user fees at Kiva (a microloan project.)